Oakdale, CA soldiers get help battling stress
By RONE TEMPEST
OAKDALE — Lt. Col. Dirk Levy, commander of a California National Guard battalion that took heavy casualties in Iraq, said he can’t get used to civilians slogging through training exercises alongside his uniformed troops. “I keep thinking, ‘Who are these people?’” Levy said.
The outsiders are psychologists, social workers and marriage counselors who recently have been embedded in some California units in an experimental program to identify National Guard troops suffering from severe stress after overseas combat. Hired as contractors, the civilian specialists have been attending weekend training at local armories.
Some even take part in physical training — such as 54-year-old psychological counselor Roger Duke, assigned to the battle-scarred 184th Infantry Regiment.
“On one level or another, I’ve had contact with every soldier,” said Duke, a sinewy ex-Marine officer who drops down to do push-ups and engages in hand-to-hand combat drills. “Hanging out with them. Listening to them. Sleeping out in the rain.”
TriWest Healthcare Alliance, the Phoenix-based military health care contractor for the western United States, approached the California National Guard with the pilot program last year after it became clear that many National Guard troops did not have the same access to mental and family counseling as regular military members.
After decades of being called up for short-term state emergency duties such as fires, floods and prison riots, these part-time “citizen soldiers” are coming home from their first extended overseas tours with serious combat-related issues. In fact, the Iraq war marks the first time since the Korean War more than 50 years ago that the National Guard, including more than 10,000 troops from California, has been used in combat.
Guard lack same access to care
Regular military service members return to permanent bases with medical clinics, surrounded by other soldiers and soldiers’ families. Guardsmen, who face the same hazards overseas, go home to a world in which most people have little understanding of what they have been through. Their armories are scattered across the state, many several hours’ drive from military or veterans health care facilities.
“These soldiers come home with the same problems as everyone else, but they weren’t clustered around military installations the way the active duty are,” said Marge Crowl, director of behavioral health for TriWest. “They weren’t coming to us. We thought putting someone with them made a lot of sense.”
If successful, TriWest envisions taking the program nationwide to reach the nearly 200,000 National Guard troops who have served in Iraq.
Read the rest of this great article at The Modesto Bee.
Now THIS is what I’m talking about! Traditionally, this is the role of Army Chaplains (at least the initial counseling and referral care), but Chaplains are the most needed specialty in the military right now (just ahead of MPs).
This is definitely promising, and the kind of outside the box thinking we need for long term success.
Good stuff!!